A Different Kind of Magic

After three whole days of exploring Tokyo, we had enough of this "cultural immersion" bullshit and made the 40-minute train ride outside the city proper to the promised land: Tokyo Disney Resort. Ah, the smell of capitalism and deep-fried snackage: it was like returning home.

Disneyland occupies a special place in my heart: tinkling with the soundtracks played ad nauseam through long car rides and games of pretend, steeped with the nostalgia of childhood vacations. I was curious to see what, if any, magic exists in a place stripped from that nostalgia. I was also interested to explore how a pillar of American culture gets translated across continents.

Japan seems to have a surprisingly friendly relationship with Disney, given the somewhat complicated context of their introduction. Following the end of World War II, the United States engaged in "reconstructing" (read: occupying) Japan. An intelligence branch known as the Civil Censorship Detachment monitored and censored all forms of Japanese media, from newspapers to radio broadcasts, and later, television programming. At the same time, Disney was basking in a warm relationship with the U.S. government, cashing in on the goodwill built up through the production of wartime anti-Nazi, pro-American animated specials.

This symbiotic relationship continued even after the war ended. The U.S. government could light up Japanese airwaves with pro-America sentiment and appropriately-American cultural sensibilities by outsourcing to a company that had already proven its aptitude for producing a particularly warm-and-fuzzy brand of propaganda. Meanwhile, Disney was given access to an untapped, captive market of viewers just waiting to be introduced to a certain pair of mice.

An entire generation of Japanese people were raised on Disney, who have embedded Disney characters, storylines, and music into the cultural almanac to a degree similar to that in the United States. Even before stepping onto the resort grounds, we had seen mega-sized Disney stores in Tokyo, passed people repping Disney branded merch, heard instrumental versions of Disney songs quietly playing in the background of restaurants, and saw souvenirs featuring a hodgepodge of traditional Japanese motifs with Disney icons (think Minnie Mouse dressed in kimono). When Frozen was released in 2014, the film made more than $250 million dollars during its theatrical release—the third-highest grossing film in Japan, ever. For a company whose origin in this country is inextricably tied to war and occupation, Disney seems to have won just about everyone over.

In 1974, talks between the Oriental Land Company (OLC) and Disney began in hopes of replicating the success of the American parks in Japan. Designers began brainstorming in earnest what a new park might look like, tailored for a foreign audience, but were quickly redirected: the OLC, on behalf of the Japanese people, was requesting an authentically American, 1:1 replica of Disneyland.

The OLC created a job training program in which employees from all sectors, gate attendants to executives, were sent to study in the U.S. and shadow the Disney employees whose roles and demeanors they would be emulating. Everything from the park layout to the rides, the standards of service to the costumes of the staff, were to be imported essentially as-is from the Anaheim park.

When Tokyo Disneyland opened after less than three years of construction in 1983, it did so with wild success, its tenth million visitor crossing the park gates less than one year after opening.

(And, as an aside, this certainly isn't a matter of Disney being universally beloved overseas. In fact, the success of the export of a mostly-unchanged Disneyland led to a misguided approach to international expansion after Tokyo. The opening of EuroDisney in 1992 [since renamed to Disneyland Paris] was dubbed a "cultural Chernobyl" by the French media, and the park was seen as a smug, plastic-clad insult of U.S. cultural imperialism.)

Overall Impressions of Tokyo Disney Resort

I have always impressed by the level of cleanliness, organization, and service at the Anaheim park. In these regards, Tokyo Disney makes Disneyland feel like a roadside carnival. The service was impossibly cheery, with employees and waiting guests alike waving enthusiastically as rides swung away from the loading stations. The parks truly are spotless: lustrous and sparkling with years of more consistent maintenance and careful upkeep.

This was, at times, a little sad. It highlighted the "hit-or-miss" quality that the U.S. parks seem to have taken on recently: with a handful of rides down for temporary errors at any given time, and guests left guessing as to which effects will be working and which will be broken when they step on to an attraction.

The prices for merchandise and food were... fair? Is this even Disney?? We spent less than $20 between the two of us for a sit-down meal, one that featured a marvel of culinary engineering: boiled eggs that, when sliced, revealed Mickey-shaped yolks. This was perhaps the most magical sight of our visit.

It was interesting to see which characters and stories receive the top billings here. Frozen is wildly popular, along with Tangled, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, Winnie the Pooh, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and, intriguingly, Pocahontas. Big Hero 6 is much more popular than in the United States, and Tokyo Disneyland is the only park to have a ride based on the film. There was not a hint of Mulan. In a welcome removal, no Avengers (with the unexpected exception of It’s A Small World ft. Baby Groot, which featured the superheroes prominently among the singing children of the world). The only presence of Star Wars was in Star Tours, tucked into a quiet section of Tomorrowland, which hovered at a wait time of 20 minutes as guests happily stood in line for upwards of three hours for other rides.

Tokyo Disney is renowned for its lengthy lines and the attendees who seem to have unlimited patience for waiting in them. Our experience in the California parks has always been that, even on the busiest days, a combination of entering early, leaving late, and shelling out a few extra dollars for some fastpasses guarantees that we can mostly check off everything on our must-do list. This is, emphatically, not the case in Tokyo Disney Resort.

Those who tend to suffer from FOMO would do well to either avoid these parks entirely or reserve a whole week to explore them fully. E-ticket attractions command multi-hour waits, while even rides that I would consider filler/kiddie entertainment were often pushing 90-minute queues. And it's not just the rides: restaurants, entrances to merch stores, restrooms, and the beloved popcorn carts (each offering a different flavor, ready to be deposited into the intricate popcorn buckets hanging around most attendees' necks) all prompt orderly, polite lines snaking around the parks.

Some of the longest non-ride waits are in front of designated photo spots, manned by Disneyland staff-members who seem genuinely delighted to conduct mini photoshoots of guests. The demand for these photo services makes sense when you see how the impeccably-dressed Japanese guests kick their style into high gear for a day at the park.

Couples and larger groups of young people (generally either all-women or all-men with few coed groups) surely must decide on coordinating outfits before entering the park, each party too complimentary to have happened spontaneously. Some groups coordinate, while others match completely from head to toe, including the many groups of young, but not schoolgirl-aged, women dressed in identical schoolgirl uniforms. Guests here avoid the branded, fandom-emblazoned gear often donned by park-goers in the U.S., sticking instead to neutrally-colored, business casual/formal attire. Graceful wool coats, ruffled ankle-length skirts, and mini skirts with sheer tights take the place of the classic sweatshirt/legging combo so popular in Anaheim.

And dear God, the footwear: towering boots zipped up to mid-thigh, polished leather loafers, and platform ankle boots wobble across walking paths. Paired with a day of standing in lines, I think the only way this combination can be explained is as a very stylish form of masochism. (And, interestingly, the only places in the park that did not demand a wait, that were always readily available: benches.)

While eared headbands are the accessory of choice in the U.S. parks, guests in Japan instead go for absurdly large, furry pieces of headwear, somewhere in between a hat and a hood, that fasten under the neck and wrap the entire head in the head of a Disney character. They create the appearance of bobbleheads. The juxtaposition between the gaudy ridiculousness of these hats perched atop the elegance of the outfits from shoulders down made us giggle all day, especially in moments in crowds when Thomas's head and shoulders jutted a foot above the rest of the hordes of people, like he was wading chest-deep through a herd of candy-colored Tribbles.

The people watching was unsurprisingly excellent, though lacking the drama of arguments and impatient parenting that make for such good entertainment in the U.S., and made the long waits pass more quickly.

Tokyo Disneyland: Tuesday, February 18

Places that I know occasionally make their way into my dreams. The dreamscape iterations of these places are fundamentally recognizable, but garbled with unfamiliar layouts, unexpected dead ends, and unreadable signs. Mostly familiar, but not entirely. Visiting Tokyo Disneyland was like gaining lucidity in a dream version of the Disneyland I know. So much of the park is the same: the hub and spoke layout, the castle at the center, the same themed lands in the same placement. Some of the rides, mostly those present on opening day, even use the exact audio recordings, completely in English, as the Anaheim originals.

Some things are repackaged for better congruence for Japanese attendees. Main Street U.S.A. is replaced with the World Bazaar, an entrance that turns down the small-town charm and turns up the opulence for an audience without nostalgia for that flavor of quaint Americana. Frontierland is renamed "Westernland" and takes up a more significant footprint of the park compared to Anaheim. Gone is New Orleans Square, and its E-ticket attraction, the Haunted Mansion, is migrated to Fantasyland.

We did as much as we could during our one day in the park, and made choices on what to just let go. Some of those choices were made for us, like Hyperspace Mountain (closed until at least 2027 for a complete reconstruction) and watery classics like Splash Mountain and Jungle Cruise (which are drained and remain closed for the winter, unlike the versions in more temperate climates). (Another aside: this version of Splash Mountain, which doesn't carry the same cultural baggage in Japan, is the only one retaining its pre-makeover identity.)

I'll go quickly through the attractions we were able to hit, attempting to avoid going into too much detail as I can already hear my sister deriding this post with cries of "Disney adult!"

• Pirates of the Caribbean: With the exception of slightly larger and grander cannon battle scene, this is an exact replica of the Anaheim version, complete with dialogue exclusively in English. In fact, maybe this version is actually more original than the current one in Anaheim, as this retains the no-longer-PC bride auction scene.

  
  

• Big Thunder Mountain: My favorite ride at Disneyland. This version is not, in fact, the "wildest ride in the wilderness," using a gentler track and maxing out at maybe 75% of the original's speed.

  
  

• Star Tours: The charisma of C3P0 and R2 transcends language. This version even included the overemphasized “buy-bye!” as we stepped off the ride. 

  

  
  

• The Happy Ride with Baymax: I think that we just didn’t get it. The 80-minute wait might have set our expectations too high. This was like any kiddie ride that spins guests across circular platforms; however, this seems to be the designated place in the park that people feel like they are allowed to dance. We were, apparently, the only people who did not know the song that is played repeatedly on this ride or the moves to the corresponding dance. 

  
  

• It’s A Small World: This one was bittersweet: the dazzling colors and gleaming scenes were gorgeous, but highlighted just how neglected the Disneyland original is.

  
  

  

  
  

• The Haunted Mansion: Very similar to the original, with the surprising addition of a few depictions of suicide that are absent in Anaheim.

  
  

• Teacups: All of the dizzying fun as the o.g., though this version kicks in a jarring auto-braking feature should your spinning become too aggressive.

  
  
  

  
  
  

• Pooh’s Hunny Hunt: What? A Winnie the Pooh ride that is fun and whimsical instead of feeling like a bad acid trip? Completely butchered the original version of the ride. 1/5 stars.

  
  

  

  
  

• Beauty and the Beast: The newest ride in the park, this featured several stunning visual effects that left Thomas and me debating how they broke the laws of physics to achieve them.

  
  

  

  
  

• Western River Railroad: An unexpected favorite of our day. The track winds through Westernland, with a narrator explaining in Japanese what life must have been like in the Wild West. We were endlessly delighted by the use of borrowed English words, which we could pluck from strings of Japanese. These borrowed English words are pronounced, well, like if one were attempting a stereotypically racist Japanese accent. We doubled over in laughter as, between Japanese phrases, we heard the exclamation of, “preh-rie-doug-u!” as a diorama of prairie dogs came into view. 

  
  

  

  
  

Tokyo DisneySea: Wednesday, February 19 and Thursday, February 20

When the Oriental Land Company, riding high on the success of Tokyo Disneyland, requested a second gate to add to the resort, developers responded with Tokyo DisneySea. Taking its cues from Disneyland, DisneySea replaces the themed lands with seven "ports of call" themed around different seaside environments, some real and some fantastical.

This park is absurdly, unfairly beautiful. Paths wind between vistas, each so stunning that ripping ourselves away to go on the rides that drew us to the park in the first place seemed like a waste of time. Water features dance and bodies of water shimmer under the sunlight, while panoramic views of the Tokyo Bay lend a tangible sense of place unlike any other theme park I have visited. On our first evening in DisneySea, we happened to look across the opening to Tokyo Bay to see Mt. Fuji soaring in the distance, backlit by the setting sun.

The park hums with kinetic energy: fountains arc towards the sky before splashing back to earth, pools of crystalline water lap stone walls, waterfalls cascade from craggy peaks, boats slice through waves on their circumnavigations, trolley cars and horse-drawn carriages and electric trains and Venetian gondoliers and paddleboats and pedestrians traverse the park together. 

We rode just about everything we could, braving a few 200-minute waits and shelling out extra cash for the reasonably-priced fastpasses. There were a few attractions we missed, but so much of the appeal of this park is its "vibe": we happily forwent a few multi-hour waits in favor of of spending a couple of hours over our two days in the park perched on a bench on an overlook, sipping cups of hot wine, and soaking in the people and the beauty and the sunshine.

A few impressions of the attractions we did hit:

• Aquatopia: How do you adapt autopia for a sea-themed park? Turn the cars into aqautic Roombas that skip playfully across the surface of a pond overlooking the Tokyo Bay. It's safe to say we did not miss the dissonant ringing and exhaust fumes (or the subsequent headache) of the original.

  
  
  

  
  
  

• Tower of Terror: What a fun mix of a return to the original haunted hotel theming, while being reinvented for an audience without any familiarity for the Twilight Zone. Like many rides, this one operated at about 70% of the physical thrill level as the U.S. versions.

  

  
  

• Soarin': Thomas's consistent favorite. Identical to the Anaheim version with the exception of an extra flight above Tokyo, and a beautiful and whimsical queue rethemed away from U.S. aviation to historical flying machines from around the world.

  
  

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A more grown up version of Disneyland's Nemo submarines, based on the novel by Jules Vernes. I haven't ready the book... does it include the discovery of a race of glowing, hyperintelligent lizards that are actually responsible for the construction of the pyramids? Delightfully cheesy.

  
  

• Journey to the Center of the Earth: Another Vernes-inspired attraction, this one snaking its way between caverns filled with crystals, subterranean fungi, magma, lakes of lightning, and bug kings (you know, the usual suspects), before flinging riders out of the mouth of a volcano with glimpses of the park below. Another cheesy, instant classic for us.

  
  

• Indiana Jones: As a lover of the Anaheim version, this was a little tough to swallow. The Anaheim version includes a few strange, dark hallways that have always seemed unfilled, a few beats of pauses that seem to be without purpose: the Tokyo version, functioning perfectly with all effects in working order, explains what should be happening in those moments. It makes my "home" version seem sparse and cobbled together by comparison.

  
  
  

  

  

  

  

  

  
  
  

• Raging Spirits: We waited for 200 minutes (yes, that is the correct number of zeroes) for this ride, having heard it was the most thrilling in the park. Thomas was descended upon almost immediately after getting in line, a castmember calling him over to a height measurement station that capped at 195 centimeters. Thomas squeaked under with a whopping one centimeter to spare, allowing us to experience together the rather slow-moving coaster with a single loop. I suppose it's true that this is the most thrilling ride in the park, but only in the same sense that black pepper is the spiciest ingredient in a picky eater's pantry.

  
  

• Sinbad's Storybook Voyage: Who is this man? Why is he attacking a flock of large birds? Why does the feather from one of these large birds unlock the cage of a genie? Why does he visit a monkey island and begin a global banana trading economy? Thomas and I understood none of this, but that didn't stop us from humming the song played throughout the ride for the rest of the day.

  
  

• Rapunzel's Lantern Festival: This is one of the newest rides in the park, unveiled as part of a recent, multi-billion expansion that opened in 2024 (this is the single largest and most-expensive update to a theme park ever), and I had heard much about this ride before we arrived. It was beautiful and romantic and captured the magic of the movie's lantern scene, and jarringly short. It was like the designers had sunk everything into the main room, realized their budget was used, and hastily threw together a couple of introductory scenes.

  
  

  

  
  

  (Noelle: this is where I recommend you skip ahead if I am to preserve any semblance of sanity in your eyes.)

  
  

• Peter Pan's Flight: I could never stay mad at you, imagineers. Whatever qualms I had with the lanterns were forgotten and forgiven as we ended our final night in the park with this ride. The first iteration of this ride was one of the original opening-day attractions in Disneyland in 1955. The updated version in Tokyo was opened almost 70 years later, with breathtaking visuals and sweeping motion that captures the feeling of flight.

  
  

  The return to the same nostalgic storyline, retold with the tools of 70 years of technological progress, completely encapsulates what I find so compelling about theme parks. To me, the magic is in the culmination of the decades of work, the ideas of teams of people collaborating, and the groundbreaking technologies that are invented just for the purpose of entertainment (and divorcing people from their hard-earned cash, but moments like this make one forget about that.)

As a kid on childhood vacations at Disneyland, I used to cry on the walk out of the park on the last evening before returning home, not wanting to leave it behind. Even on the visits I have made as adult, the weight of responsibilities and work and decision-making seem to settle heavily back on my shoulders as I step out of the gates (a sign of the complete escapism the parks represent, I suppose).

This time was different. We enjoyed our time in the parks wholeheartedly, and I am happy to have included these days in our itinerary. But when comparing our trip to the parks with the true magic we experienced in our first few days of exploring Tokyo, and the intoxicating excitement of the next five (!!) weeks of traveling across Japan, there was no sense of disappointment at leaving, no pausing to get a final glimpse of the scenery, no discussion of when we would be returning next time. Our only talk was of our next destination: Hakone.